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‘Going out’ is widely recognised as a central leisure activity in the lives of many young people (Chatterton and Hollands, Urban nightscapes: Youth cultures, pleasure spaces and corporate power. Routledge, 2003; Waitt et al., ‘The guys in there just expect to be laid’: Embodied and gendered socio-spatial practices of a ‘night out’ in Wollongong, Australia. Gender, Place & Culture, 18(2), pp. 255–275, 2011), and engaging in leisure practices in the Night-Time Economy (NTE) is likely to be an important part of women’s lives in the UK. Indeed, the ‘night on the town’ is framed in many research accounts as offering important opportunities for young women to relax, socialise with friends and escape from the often mundane realities of everyday life, work and other responsibilities (Guise and Gill, ‘Binge drinking? It’s good, it’s harmless fun’: A discourse analysis of accounts of female undergraduate drinking in Scotland. Health Education Research, 22(6), pp. 895–906, 2007; Jayne et al., Emotional, embodied and affective geographies of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35(4), pp. 540–554, 2010). Yet, young women’s experiences of the NTE are also clearly shaped by neoliberal and gendered expectations around consumption, body work and self-regulation. In particular, it is important to explore in more depth how—within a supposed ‘post-feminist’ context—expectations around ‘appropriately’ feminine dress and behaviour may continue to shape the experiences of young women like Nicole in contemporary leisure spaces. But what does it actually mean and look like for young women to be ‘feminine’ today? Is this something that is relevant or important to them? How are tensions around girliness and femininity lived and negotiated in practice in women’s everyday lives? And crucially, is it still more difficult for some women to adopt ‘appropriately’ feminine identities than others? This book considers these questions and explores the ways in which women’s participation in the UK NTE continues to be constrained in a supposedly post-feminist society (Harris, Jamming girl culture: Young women and consumer citizenship. In A. Harris (ed.) All about the girl: Culture, power and identity. Routledge, 2004).

With what Chatterton and Hollands call the ‘ritual descent’ (2002: 95) of young women into bars and clubs every weekend, we must take seriously young women’s participation in such spaces and explore further what role participating in the NTE plays in young women’s lives. Participating in the NTE has been increasingly recognised as an important component of the lives of many young women (Hollands 1995), and the participants in my study were no exception. Set against a backdrop of conflicting debates positioning the NTE as simultaneously a site of both pleasure and regulation, it is important to understand the value engaging with the NTE has for young women and the ways in which this can offer opportunities for ‘doing’ femininities or girliness and cementing friendships within these spaces. The girls’ night out represents a discreet and distinctive mode of engagement with the NTE, yet one that has received little attention in research, despite the fact that it is likely to reveal a huge amount about the individual and collective production and negotiation of femininities and friendships in nightlife venues. This chapter provides the backdrop for the remainder of the book by exploring what the girls’ night out means to young women and the central role it can play in the negotiation and maintenance of friendships and in doing ‘girly’. Whilst previous research has depicted friendships within the NTE as potentially shallow or instrumental and consumption practices as highly individualised, this chapter highlights the ways in which going out was described as an important and valued opportunity to maintain close female friendships, spend time together and enjoy opportunities to socialise and relax. I will also introduce some of the ways in which alcohol consumption was central to the young women’s negotiations of the NTE. Drinking could take on a particular role on the girls’ night out, where alcohol could function in the maintenance and cementing of friendships and the creation of intimacy (particularly when ‘pre-drinking’ at home). Consuming certain types of alcohol could also enable ‘girliness’ to be embodied in particular ways through certain consumption choices. I argue that the ‘girling’ of drinking and clubbing is particularly significant because alcohol consumption in public spaces has traditionally been recognised as a masculine pastime, rendering drinking and femininity fundamentally incompatible. If young women are able to rupture the linkages between public drinking and masculinity, they may be able to recast women’s presence and alcohol consumption in the contemporary NTE as feminine and respectable. I also explore the ways in which getting ready for a girls’ night offered further opportunities to do girliness collectively.

Against a backdrop of research suggesting that young women are still expected to engage in active risk management on a night out (Brooks, ‘Guys! Stop doing it!’: Young women’s adoption and rejection of safety advice when socializing in bars, pubs and clubs. British Journal of Criminology, 51(4), pp. 635–651, 2011), this chapter will explore the centrality of understanding of space and visibility to young women’s negotiations of risk and safety in mainstream bars and clubs in Newcastle’s NTE. Visibility comes into play in two distinct ways here—firstly, as in the previous chapter, participants drew on narratives of ‘fitting in’, this time to describe the types of venues that felt comfortable and safe to them. Attending a venue where they felt out of place or ‘different’ to other patrons could leave women feeling exposed, visible and vulnerable, and these spaces were positioned as risky and dangerous. Secondly, women recognised that bars and clubs are spaces where ‘everyday’ experiences of heterosexualised violence are trivialised and normalised, and they managed their dress and appearance in particular ways in order to position themselves as less visible—or even invisible—to try to avoid ‘unwanted attention’ and harassment.

As the previous chapter has highlighted, alcohol consumption plays an important role in the maintenance of friendships and in the individual and collective production of ‘girly’ or feminine identities in the NTE. Yet long-standing and pervasive images of alcohol consumption as a threat to femininity mean women’s negotiations of drinking continue to be fraught with tensions and ambivalences. In something of a paradox, ‘the contradictions engendered by post-feminist discourse constitute drunkenness as unfeminine, [yet] young women are enthusiastically exhorted to consume within the neoliberal culture of intoxication’ (Hutton et al. 2016: 82). In other words, to be a good, neoliberal citizen within leisure sites such as the NTE requires women to consume alcohol, yet the demands of femininity necessitate that they also show restraint. At the same time, the NTE is portrayed as a site where abandonment, hedonism and ‘rowdy’ behaviour are to an extent normalised, perhaps even encouraged, yet such behaviour ruptures traditional expectations of femininity as passive and ‘ladylike’. How do women negotiate and make sense of some of these tensions as they confront the ‘orderly disorder’ (Smith 2014: 2) of a typical night out? Is there a degree of acceptance of ‘rowdy’ or transgressive behaviour? And how does this sit alongside an expectation to be girly, as outlined in the previous chapter?

This chapter charts the ways in which young women’s negotiations of dress in the NTE are shaped by notions of visibility and authenticity and also by class. I explore the ways in which an exaggerated or emphasised mode of femininity is normalised to an extent within the NTE and highlight some of the pleasures and values young women found in their negotiations of femininity through dress, whether wholeheartedly embracing or ‘flashing’ femininity. Tensions and ambivalences are exposed as the participants both adopted and resisted elements of ‘girly’ and ‘tomboy’ identities. I then explore the ways in which forms of classed othering function to construct the feminine self in contrast to those who are perceived to lack the taste and resources to ‘do’ femininity appropriately and instead embody a somehow inauthentic and overdone performance of femininity. I briefly consider the intersections between hyper-feminine and ‘slutty’ dress, and finally explore how attempts by working-class young women to resignify a more excessive look as ‘glamorous’ may be mocked and judged beyond the local context.

Major record labels involved in this year’s Brit Awards are among the latest targets of HMRC's continued crackdown on unpaid internships.

Querying Consent examines the ways in which the concept of consent is used to map and regulate sexual desire, gender relationships, global positions, technological interfaces, relationships of production and consumption, and literary and artistic interactions. From philosophy to literature, psychoanalysis to the art world, the contributors to Querying Consent address the most uncomfortable questions about consent today. Grounded in theoretical explorations of the entanglement of consent and subjectivity across a range of textual, visual, multi- and digital media, Querying Consent considers the relationships between consent and agency before moving on to trace the concept’s outcomes through a range of investigations of the mutual implication of personhood and self-ownership.

I thought getting a job in music meant sitting in the boardroom of Columbia with Beyonce. What I encountered was much darker.

As allegations of sexual misconduct continue to rock the entertainment industry, lawyers predict there could be one unintended consequence: less opportunities for women in music.

Introducing a new series on Noisey.

Setting the Stage for Sexual Assault: The Dynamics of Gender, Culture, Space and Sexual Violence at Live Music Events

The term ‘Night-Time Economy’ was coined in the late twentieth century (Shaw 2014) in town planning circles, and increasingly used into the twenty-first century to describe the expanding number of pubs, bars and clubs concentrated in city centres and targeting predominantly 18–24-year-olds (Roberts 2006: 332). But what exactly is the Night-Time Economy, and what role does it play in the lives of young women today? How has it changed as a site of leisure, and what does it mean to say that neoliberal forces have played a role in shaping it? What do we mean by the supposed ‘feminisation’ of the NTE, and what are the implications of this process for the ways that women engage with these spaces? This chapter charts the development of the NTE in the UK and the rise of the ‘24-hour city’, highlighting the ways in which neoliberal ideals have shaped both the landscape of the NTE and the types of behaviours and consumption practices that are expected within it. Such considerations are important for research that attends both to the wider social structures within the NTE and the individual specificities of the lives of young people as they participate in it. I will then explore the significance of space and place in research focusing on the NTE, situating the current study geographically and exploring Newcastle’s own NTE in more depth and detail.

As has become increasingly evident throughout this book, the girls’ night out clearly offers specific and nuanced ways in which to do femininities and friendships which are not present in other types of night out, and perhaps also specific types of pressures to do femininity. Whilst the NTE is increasingly recognised as a useful avenue through which to research young people’s lives, less attention has been given to the girls’ night out as a specific type of engagement with the NTE that may illuminate nuances in the ways in which young women ‘do’ gender and femininities. This book thus marks a unique contribution within a wider body of research on young people’s drinking and clubbing. This concluding chapter will pull together the main arguments outlined throughout this book, highlighting the tensions and contradictions embedded in young women’s negotiations of femininity and the ways in which these reflect the idea that the successful embodiment of ‘girly’ and ‘girliness’ is simultaneously something that is desired yet derided.

This article considers the critique of inequality, exploitation and exclusion in contemporary UK music industries, in light of the latter’s growing internal concerns over work-based gender relations. The creative sector’s persistent inequalities are at odds with its professed liberal, egalitarian, meritocratic values and attitudes. Yet, within music’s industrial production cultures, a dismissive postfeminist sensibility has come under pressure through a reflexive critical moment of popular feminist discourse, expressed in trade press critique, between 2013 and the present moment. Drawing from a study of intermediary work in UK major record labels, the article takes a pragmatist approach to documenting and theorizing this critique – alongside institutional mechanisms, like company policies and corporate PR, that respond to it – in terms of growing industrial reflexivity. Tensions over the representation of work, the nature of inequality, intergenerational and epistemic injustice emerge as key themes, with implications for critical research on popular music industries.

Up to 43% of women under 40, who have been to a music festival, say they have faced unwanted sexual behaviour.

MBW Contributing Editor, Rhian Jones, gives her take on the news…

This chapter considers “passion” as an enthusiastic orientation to work within creative worlds: work motivated by intense attachments to the products of work and their conditions of production. Drawing on Luc Boltanski’s pragmatic sociology of critique and justification, the chapter argues that the passionate lens most usefully trains our sights on normative questions: not what or how—but why such work is undertaken. Embedded in research on cultural and creative industries, the contemporary recorded music sector is presented as a “passionate” industry in transformation. Interviews with workers, who both criticize and defend their industry, act as a springboard to explore three possible interpretive approaches: affirmative, critical, and pragmatic. Theoretical flexibility is needed to keep “passion” open to future inquiry—particularly regarding inequalities in creative work.

This article deploys ethnographic data to explain why some students do not label experiences as sexual assault or report those experiences. Using ideas of social risks and productive ambiguities, it argues that not labeling or reporting assault can help students (1) sustain their current identities and allow for several future ones, (2) retain their social relationships and group affiliations while maintaining the possibility of developing a wider range of future ones, or (3) avoid derailing their current or future goals within the higher educational setting, or what we call “college projects.” Conceptually, this work advances two areas of sociological research. First, it expands the framework of social risks, or culturally specific rationales for seemingly illogical behavior, by highlighting the interpersonal and institutional dimensions of such risks. Second, it urges researchers to be more attentive to contexts in which categorical ambiguity or denial is socially productive and to take categorical avoidance seriously as a subject of inquiry. Substantively, this work advances knowledge of why underreporting of campus sexual assault occurs, with implications for institutional policies to support students who have experienced unwanted nonconsensual sex regardless of how those students may label what happened.